Dreams - Writers Forum

Serenade · 12-08-2005, 04:40 PM

Basically, does everyone dream? Are there some people who don't? Are there some who dream more than others? And does dreaming have anything to do with imagination, ie: does a guy with little imagination dream?

SeattleGhostWriter · 12-08-2005, 04:43 PM

Serenade - Actually, to answer your question, everyone does dream. Even those who claim they do not dream. The question is whether some remember their dreams or not.

There is a lot regarding what dreams possibly mean, how they influence our lives. What types of dreams, symbolism within dreams, etc. I would start by doing some research on dreams in general. What causes dreams, What types of dreams are there? etc.

I hope that helps

Hodge · 12-08-2005, 04:45 PM

Everyone dreams any time they fall into deep sleep (which typically happens 90 minutes or so after falling asleep). Just not everyone remembers it.

Some people dream in black and white, while others dream in color.

Dreaming has nothing to do with imagination. The prevailing theory right now is that dreaming is a byproduct of our hippocampus encoding long term memories, that it's essentially your brain processing the events of the day (and you do remember things just before you asleep more accurately and often than things earlier in the day).

Serenade · 12-08-2005, 04:45 PM

Yeah, I guess I'll google it up. Thanks for the advice.

Edit

Then what's the explanation for the people who claim to have prophetic dreams?

Ilan Bouchard · 12-08-2005, 05:05 PM

Quote:

Everyone dreams any time they fall into deep sleep (which typically happens 90 minutes or so after falling asleep). Just not everyone remembers it.

Actually, dreams occur about ten minutes into sleep. The longer you sleep, the longer the pauses between REM (rapid eye movement--the state you're in when you dream) and the longer the REM periods.

I can't explain prophetic dreams, but I have them fairly often. They're known as precognitions, aka precogs.

Serenade · 12-08-2005, 05:24 PM

I just read some quick facts about dreams, and one said that a lack of dream activity entails personality disorder. If that's true, then it would tie in nicely with what I'm writing. Anyone know anything about this?

SeattleGhostWriter · 12-08-2005, 05:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Serenade

Yeah, I guess I'll google it up. Thanks for the advice.

Edit

Then what's the explanation for the people who claim to have prophetic dreams?

This is a hard one to ask. Because only the individual truly knows what they have dreamed or not dreamed.

One best suggestion is to research this out too.

silverwriter · 12-08-2005, 06:56 PM

Prophetic dreams can go into the realm of being a mystic thing, or can simply be natural depending on what the dream was.

Dreaming is a way of organizing. Sometimes you have too many facts while you are awake and the organization that occurs in dreams will lead you to conclusions about something that will happen. Conclusions that you would not have come to while awake.

As long as we're on the subject of dreams, I would suggest exploring lucid dreamers. (People who can control, to varying degrees, their dreams)

Ilan Bouchard · 12-08-2005, 09:40 PM

Off Topic:

Dreaming is one of the few hobbies I have. Without bragging, I'm almost certain I'll know more about it than anyone else on the forums.

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I just read some quick facts about dreams, and one said that a lack of dream activity entails personality disorder. If that's true, then it would tie in nicely with what I'm writing. Anyone know anything about this?

That's wrong/a myth. People always dream, it's just whether or not they remember their dreams. You're far likelier to remember your dreams if you wake up in the middle of one. Others can remember their dreams, or multiple dreams, regardless of when they wake up.
A personality disorder may be more apparent in what kinds of dreams they have.

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As long as we're on the subject of dreams, I would suggest exploring livid dreamers. (People who can control, to varying degrees, their dreams)

I think you mean lucid dreaming. And it's definitely something to look into.
While we're on the subject of dreams, I also suggest looking into out-of-body experiences.

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Dreaming is a way of organizing. Sometimes you have too many facts while you are awake and the organization that occurs in dreams will lead you to conclusions about something that will happen. Conclusions that you would not have come to while awake.

I'm not sure that's true. As far as I know, there's no proof behind why we dream (or even why we sleep at all), though there are plenty of theories.

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Then what's the explanation for the people who claim to have prophetic dreams?

This is a hard one to ask. Because only the individual truly knows what they have dreamed or not dreamed.

One best suggestion is to research this out too.

I'm yelling ye I have these things on a regular basis. They vary from a few seconds to several minutes.
I saw a short scene from 50 First Dates about a year before it came out through this.

Hodge · 12-08-2005, 10:33 PM

Prophetic dreams can often be accounted for by the hindsight bias. Most people don't wake up and think, "I'm going to be hit by a bus today." They get hit by the bus and then, while they're in the hospital bed, they think, "wait, did I dream this was going to happen? OHMIGOD! I did!"

Dreams are particularly funny when you remember them, because you often can't tell when you had them.

Using your 50 First Dates example, how do you know that after watching the movie you didn't have a dream in which you recalled a dream from before (when it really wasn't, I've had this happen many times)?

Or it could have been a more generic scene from a movie (and let's be honest, Adam Sandler hasn't exactly been a pioneer in the movie world) that you later, because of the hindsight bias, remembered differently (influenced by the scene of the movie).

Ilan Bouchard · 12-08-2005, 11:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hodge

Prophetic dreams can often be accounted for by the hindsight bias. Most people don't wake up and think, "I'm going to be hit by a bus today." They get hit by the bus and then, while they're in the hospital bed, they think, "wait, did I dream this was going to happen? OHMIGOD! I did!"

Very true.

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Using your 50 First Dates example, how do you know that after watching the movie you didn't have a dream in which you recalled a dream from before (when it really wasn't, I've had this happen many times)?

I'm not quite sure what you mean. I know I've dreamt it because in my initial dream I have the deja vú in which I know I've seen it before, but don't know where.
Then when I saw it, I knew I had not only seen it but remembered seeing it, so as I watched 50 First Dates I realized I had dreamt that I had realized that I had dreamt that scene before.
Very confusing.

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Or it could have been a more generic scene from a movie (and let's be honest, Adam Sandler hasn't exactly been a pioneer in the movie world) that you later, because of the hindsight bias, remembered differently (influenced by the scene of the movie).

Are you getting that I didn't really have any precog dreams before, and that I was confusing another real memory with the newer one?
I'd say that was possible, but some of my precogs have been so specific I really can't see how that'd be possible.

The best example I'd have is a time (the first precog I had, actually) in which a classmate was presenting a newspaper article about a man who had died playing chicken in front of a train. Only I had dreamt that situation only two hours before it actually occurred, so it was so fresh in my mind that I mumbled the presentation word for word in unison with him.
Answer for that?

Hodge · 12-09-2005, 12:00 AM

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Answer for that?

LSD.

What I mean is that you have a dream where a previous dream is part of that dream. Maybe you think, "wow, this is like that dream I had last week!"

Only you didn't have that dream last week. You did not have the dream at all; it was part of the dream it was in. Yet because it's a dream and dreams are not bound by any rules, you feel like you've had that dream before. And when you wake up it's really hard to tell whether you actually had the dream last week and just forgot it or if you didn't have it at all.

Maybe you're psychic. Our own government poured money into a project called Operation Stargate in response to alleged Soviet attempts to train psychic spies. They had what were called "remote viewers," which are also known as clairvoyants. Basically, the remote viewers were asked to describe places and objects they were not in the presence of and they had an incredibly unlikely 35% success rate. It seems somewhat low, but the chance of it happening purely by luck is something like one in ten trillion. In one famous case, a man described a construction site in Russia exactly like sattelite photos showed a month or so later. A man also saw Jupiter's ring before astronomers knew it was there.

Ilan Bouchard · 12-09-2005, 01:16 AM

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Only you didn't have that dream last week. You did not have the dream at all; it was part of the dream it was in. Yet because it's a dream and dreams are not bound by any rules, you feel like you've had that dream before. And when you wake up it's really hard to tell whether you actually had the dream last week and just forgot it or if you didn't have it at all.

Ah, I see what you mean now.
But isn't that similar to saying that many of my memories may not exist?
And wasn't there a debate on that already?

journyman161 · 12-09-2005, 04:38 AM

I've had a number of dreams over the years which have come true up to 3 years later - the reason I've remembered them is the incredible detail in them at the time. For me they are an explanation for deja vu.

Normal dreams occur as the mind processes the minutiae of the days events - and the varying results are because as the events are gone through, each perception is associated within the mind & some associations are simple & some are complex. So an event that was fairly major may contain one item that has an association to a complete event already stored in the mind & that 'event' will run to completion, causing confusion to the single-tracked 'cause & effect' conscious mind.

This is why the sound of the alarm bell can cause a complete dream involving a house fire & fire trucks etc even though the bell may have only rung a few instants. It seems long because it is stored as a complete event.

It is the associations that cause memories to be stored as part of our sensory universe, sometimes altering the shape of our mental landscape when one little datum triggers a cascade of associations. These paradigm shifts can be so mind altering that we are sometimes unable to understand what was previously our normal point of view.

Dreamless people DO exist & also have been created both permanently & temporarily & being dreamless leads to psychosis - usually very quickly. Torture involving sleeplessness breaks the subject down rapidly as the mind begins to stretch further & further from reality as it tries to complete the memory sequencing that we accomplish with dreaming.

Ilan Bouchard · 12-09-2005, 01:32 PM

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For me they are an explanation for deja vu.

Apparently deja vu and precogs are different; precogs are in fact dreams, where as deja vu is just a split second in which one side of your brain processes something faster than the other (essentially making you in fact experience it twice).

Quote:

Dreamless people DO exist & also have been created both permanently & temporarily & being dreamless leads to psychosis - usually very quickly. Torture involving sleeplessness breaks the subject down rapidly as the mind begins to stretch further & further from reality as it tries to complete the memory sequencing that we accomplish with dreaming.

Where did you hear that (the psychosis)? If you have a link or something, I'd be more inclined to believe it, but as far as I know everyone dreams (scroll down to "Part I").
Also, the CIA and other organizations have concluded that sleep deprivation generally doesn't work very effectively, as the torturee begins hallucinating after three or four days.